++The grimwoods hold dangers mankind was not made to weather. Trust in your masters to guard against them; in your Witchfinders to stave off infiltration from their depths, in your Circumscribers to purge infestations too great for that. But never venture into them yourself. Evil awaits within, evil that disguises itself in promises of power and freedom. There is no freedom without suffering.++

  Chapter 3

  Reggie was alerted to the bear’s presence by a sudden inversion of local gravity fields, caused, he hypothesised, when a paw the size of a toddler smashed into him and sent him flying. Everything hurt. It hurt before he even hit the ground, before he even knew he’d been launched, and then it hurt a great deal more on impact with the hard soil and the roll that followed.

  Just roll, keep moving, don’t stop too fast. It was the sudden stops that killed you. That, and fighting enemies strong enough that you were left pondering the effects of fall-related injuries after a single attack.

  By the time Reggie came to a stop, he’d already bounced and tumbled about a dozen feet along the ground. He was no bear expert, but that seemed a slightly excessive distance. What was more, his gun was gone, blown out of his hands and tumbled clear. He got up, groaning and feeling every inch of his body down the left side throb like he’d just spent an hour being used as a punching bag. Eyes watering, breaths heaving, limbs trembling, he saw Ludvich taking on their attacker.

  The Witchfinder was moving like Reggie never would, but even he seemed to be at a disadvantage. Stepping back, exerting himself just to keep up the space even between his flesh and those claws, staring into the snarling face of the bear as its lips peeled back over jagged teeth and its eyes blasted a mindless savagery Reggie hadn’t known any natural animal to have. Sabre swings came down on the creature, opening skin, biting deep into yellow fat below, drawing blood. Each was swung with an inhuman strength, none did more than irritate the creature. This wasn’t right. How could this thing be so resilient?

  But then Reggie’s mind clicked, and all the curiosity and confusion gave way to explosions of activity. Gun. Where gun? Gun on ground? In tree? Gun up ass? His brain became primitive and animalistic in its desperation, stumbling from one thought to another in a grunting stupor, and he found no trace of his musket.

  So he drew the pistol at his hip and fired that instead.

  Pistol, Tier 0. Mundane.

  Modifiers; Strength +4.

  This time Reggie’s aim was good, and the musket ball thudded hard into its target just over one shoulder. He saw a brief spurt of blood, heard the bear scream, then watched as its gaze turned to him.

  Reggie had just enough time to ponder whether he’d made a considerable mistake, then the bear moved.

  It was an avalanche made out of meat and fur, charging right for him. Reginald Smith was not a brave man, and so it felt quite natural to him when his body turned around and started sprinting in the other direction. He only got a few paces before the bear was on him, lunging, paw coming down hard on his backpack.

  The world became a mess of sound, ringing ears, blood, light, blurred vision. There was dirt in Reggie’s mouth, his head hurt, everything was weird; tilted, tumbling, curling, melting. He blinked, vision settling again, head still throbbing, mind restoring order.

  What had happened? Reggie groaned as he turned over onto his back, looked around and saw…a mess.

  The bear was still alive, unfortunately, thrashing around and screaming as blood pumped from a mangled mess at the end of one limb. Reggie’s pack seemed to have come off his back somewhere, and was now lying across about fifty square feet, smouldering shards of fabric denoting where each piece had landed.

  That pack had caught the bear’s blow, and that pack, filled with his explosive quicksilver crystals, had gone off from the shock of impact. Had he not filled it with so much other shit, padding, bandages, other containers, the blast probably would’ve snapped his spine and killed him. As things were the actual explosion had started at the very back, farthest from his body, with a good foot of other material between him and it.

  But the bear’s paw hadn’t been inadvertently shielded like he had. The meat of it was shredded, claws jutting out haphazardly. Reggie saw the animal move in convulsive agony, but knew he didn’t have long before it recovered.

  Then he saw his lost musket laying on the ground just a few yards from him.

  He lunged just as the animal recovered, took his weapon, rolled and brought it up. Reggie’s second shot was luckier than the first. This one hit the bear right in its foreleg, its good leg, and seemed to hit the bone. It rebounded out the side of the limb, ripping a good few ounces of meat out with it and turning the mad animal’s charge into a stumble.

  Before that stumble could reach him, Ludvich was on it.

  He leapt higher than Reggie’s head and fell hard on its back, legs wrapped around the bear’s neck as he pressed the barrel of two pistols to both sides of its head. The hammers came down, black powder burned, and twin gunshots excavated the creature’s skull. Even still, it moved for a few moments.

  But only for a few moments. The bear crumpled, landing with the sound of a felled tree, and Reggie waited only a moment before smashing the back of its ruined head with his musket-butt. It took a good dozen strikes before he felt confident in stopping, mostly due to the fatigue of his tortured arms.

  “What did you have in your pack?” the Witchfinder asked him, “that new explosive?”

  “Yeah.” Reggie’s back hurt now, the chaos of combat wearing off and leaving him to feel all the aches and cuts he’d been left with. His ears were ringing, too. He nodded to the animal. “Close one.”

  “Too close,” Ludvich growled. He knelt down beside the bear, put his face up right next to its head—exposed brain-matter not seeming to bother him at all—and sniffed. Reggie stared at what was probably one of the weirder displays he’d ever seen for the several moments it took to conclude. Then Ludvich got up, face a mask of concern. “This was not normal.”

  “You think?” Reggie asked.

  “This bear, something’s wrong with it. Not rabies. Something unnatural.”

  Oh. Reggie listened, curious now.

  “We need to bring it back with us to study,” the Witchfinder continued, “I can’t find out what’s wrong with it here.”

  Reggie took a second to process that.

  “Bring it back with us.” He echoed the words, waiting for the coin to drop. Then it did. “Uh, okay, do you have a wagon? Five other people in your asshole that I’m not seeing? It’s a bear, it probably weighs a thousand pounds, what are we—”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Ludvich picked the bear up.

  “More like eight hundred, I think,” he scowled, “bugger it, this used to be a lot easier. Come on, let’s hurry before something else tries to take a bite out of us.”

  Reggie just stared as they walked off, reminded for the millionth time just how unfair life was. Well, nothing he could do by just complaining. They both took off from the scene of their fight, with Reggie glancing over his shoulder and taking a moment to soak up the sight of its devastation. Just a few seconds had been enough for that damned bear to churn up what looked like a half-thousand square feet of dirt and tree roots. Not natural, definitely not natural.

  It seemed there was nothing natural at all within the grimwood, and Reggie kept that in mind while he walked. He kept his guard up and his trigger finger itchy as they moved, not all that much slower now despite Ludvich’s added burden. Every moment spent in the woods felt like one with an executioner’s axe held over his head.

  But that was nothing new. Reggie’d lived his whole life perpetually one incident away from joining his parents on the stake. He could steal, cheat, fight —be as much a menace to society as he wanted, really. But if he did anything too demonic…

  Well, nothing in the grimwood could kill him harder than the good people of Norvhan might one day.

  They reached those people after only an hour or so, though Reggie remained fully coiled with fear the whole time he was staring at the town’s outskirts. Those last hundred paces through the thinning fog to Ludvich’s house were agony, and he almost collapsed after finishing them.

  Ludvich, damn him, didn’t look much more than winded. Even with five times his weight over one shoulder he’d moved about as easily as Reggie had, seeming more grumpy than tired and now eager to dump the carcass.

  “We’ll take this to William, see what he makes of it.” Reggie winced. William was one of the best local alchemists. Actually, he was the best, but that was more down to his having a contest pool of only one other. He was also the one Reggie had robbed for quicksilver, and probably smart enough to have figured that fact out in the few days since it’d made itself known.

  “Something bothering you about that?” Ludvich asked him abruptly, reading Reggie’s face with all the observational skills of a man who was paid lots of money to find out secrets from people that wanted to kill him.

  “No,” Reggie lied, more out of habit than any serious hope of misleading him.

  Whether he liked it or not, they did need to investigate this bear. Or rather, Ludvich did, and Reggie needed to help with whatever Ludvich needed to do so that he could secure more tag-alongs, acquire more experience as a Witchfinder, and hopefully die either rich or with, at least, realistic hopes of being rich.

  “I’m going to haul this over myself and dissect it with William,” Ludvich told Reggie as he split off from him, “you try to stay out of trouble.”

  “You don’t want me to help?” Reggie frowned.

  “No. My Toughness stat makes me resistant to most toxins and diseases, and I’m still taking a risk here. Something that can drive a bear mad will kill you outright if it makes the jump to humans.”

  Said like that, Reggie found himself agreeing quite fast. But it also meant that he was suddenly left with a lot less to do.

  It took him about two seconds to decide on crime as a time sink, but what variety? Well, that was in the hands of God. Reggie just started sprinting down the street in search of something to steal, destroy or terrorise. Being surrounded by human-built structures again after such perpetual terror was a feeling past description.

  That feeling, that elation, didn’t take long to wither though. It wasn’t so dark now, people were up, moving around. Some of them saw him in the street. Where they saw him, they glared. Spat, shot molten hatred right at him as if they hoped a great enough concentration of contempt might strike Reggie dead and rid them all of him at last.

  Reggie smiled right back, because he knew that would bother them more.

  Norvhan by dawn was a town transformed. The mists never really went away from it, but with the sidelong light of a rising sun there seemed a dull glow to them that threatened to make the place somewhat pretty, despite its otherwise horribly depressing construction. There was a beauty to it that Reggie was reluctantly forced to acknowledge. Wooden walls poking high, stone bases slick with moisture and glinting in the early light. This wasn’t a city, its streets were wide and spacious in the way that country towns seemed exclusively allowed to build.

  Reggie didn’t like that about it. Didn’t like all the corners, the long, straight lines of sight. He could feel eyes on him. Through windows, behind doors, around edges to alleys and peeking out from under the cover of shingles and backhouses. He ignored it all, shivered at the sensation all the same. Surely the world had better things to do than stalking him.

  Damn demons.

  It wouldn’t do to be so distracted by his eternal playmates that he let someone sneak up behind him, of course. Particularly when the very sight of Reggie’s distress—or as the people of Norvhan called it, ‘his demented, creepy, evil witchcraft muttering’—would only inspire such torments all the more. It was funny, he often thought. Reggie made a point of staying away from things he thought might be powerful witches, whatever it was that possessed people to fuck with him when he was being weird and scary surely wasn’t a survival trait.

  [It’s you. They know you. They see you.]

  Shut up, demonic voice that lives in my head. And boy wasn’t it just liberating to be able to address it again? Not that the demon ever answered him back of course, no. It just…told him things.

  Reggie kept walking, eyes darting between all the sight lines, body forcibly still and twitchless for fear of inviting trouble. The thought of doing a crime was no thought at all, now. Not with the town feeling as it did, hungry and hateful. Waiting, watching. It wanted him to step out of line. Today would be the day that doing so would see Reggie hanged. He wasn’t sure how he knew, he just did. Felt it. Tasted it. Acid on his tongue, a noose around his neck. Something moved at the edge of his vision and he bolted.

  It took a while before Reggie had calmed back down. For once, heading to his home on the edge of town actually served as some kind of mental refuge. If there was one advantage to being so close to the grimwoods, it was the fact that nobody else ever wanted to match that closeness.

  But the demons didn’t care, and he was left curled up and waiting for them to leave for the better part of an hour. He caught himself whimpering, twitching as they threatened and sneered, circled around him like waiting vultures and promised to make a feast of him later. But later, not now. Eventually they left.

  It was fully light by the time Reggie headed back into wider Norvhan, which was good as it meant less shadows and less eyes. It was also, in a way, bad, because it gave everybody a clearer sight-line to him. Now Reggie had no particular goal in mind, just wandering around and keeping his legs moving. He ended up turning it into an exercise.

  Thing with being Vagrant was that exhaustive physical torture was about the only way to even remain semi-competative with just ordinary people. Reggie tried to manage thirty miles a day when he could, which wasn’t as often as he’d have liked. He tried to do a good few hundred push-ups, pull-ups, squats, other bodyweight exercises he’d read or been told about from Witchfinder accounts, too. In all likelihood, Reggie had, despite his impoverishment, gained himself the fittest body in Norvhan, and by no small margin.

  In fact, it was almost not-shit by the standards of anyone with a Class.

  Today he only hit twenty miles, already somewhat tired from his hasty trek through the grimwoods and, near the end of this run, stumbling onto something that gave him pause. A person. Not just any person, though, Norvhan was full of those, no. This was a new person.

  A new woman, no less. That left Reggie unsure of how to approach. Women were odd. Not as immediately dangerous as men, but sneaky. A man would attack him outright, if Reggie bothered them, but it was the women who’d get him killed. They’d find him frightening, unnerving, they’d project some planned assault or prolonged menacing onto him and cry about it so loudly and often that every set of ears in the town would hear. Then people would move, as people were wont to do when a woman of respect pointed fingers at a person of none, and before Reggie knew it he’d be strung up and doing the hanged man’s dance, legs kicking and bowels emptying.

  So he was cautious about the woman, because Reginald Smith wanted nothing to do with a noose.

  “Hello,” he began, approaching the woman but keeping his distance to a few paces and never lowering his guard, not wanting to be taken unawares if she suddenly stabbed him or exploded.

  “Good morning,” the woman smiled. She was lurking in an alley, shaded from the sun by long darkness creeping out between buildings. Reginald saw nothing wrong with that of course, he’d done his fair share of lurking in the shadows too, but he didn’t like how this one was looking at him. An element of…well, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, demonic, cannibalistic hunger and sexual molestation.

  “You’re new,” he blurted out. The woman wasn’t from Norvhan, nor any of the surrounding regions. He could tell that much at a glance. She dressed all fancy-like, almost elfish in dark reds and blacks, pointed shoes, a pointed hat…pointed everything, it seemed. She was paler than most of the locals, her hair was black as coal and her eyes a strange colour he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Pretty, Reggie thought. But it was hard to tell. The way she looked at him was overshadowing anything else, prettiness just didn’t register compared to that unnerving stare.

  “I am,” she confirmed. That accent, definitely not local.

  “Hi.” Reggie turned around and sprinted away from the woman, he was doing a lot of that lately.